South Carolina baseball has a long tradition of excellence which includes 11 College World Series appearances as well as four national runner-up finishes, but it was the 2010 team, led by Coach Ray Tanner, which broke through to win its first national championship. Whit Merrifield’s RBI single to right field in the bottom of the 11th inning of game two of the championship series against UCLA scored Scott Wingo for the game-winning run to cap Carolina’s first title. The 2010 and 2011 squads are part of the 2026 USC Association of Lettermen’s Athletics Hall of Fame class.
“We don’t win the 2010 World Series if we didn’t have so many players contribute,” Tanner said. “You can’t have two or three guys make the all-tournament team and win it. So many players stepped up at different times. It was really unique.”
“I get asked about the hit a little less now that I’m getting older,” Merrifield said. “It becomes more of a conversation now when I do get asked about it. That makes it fun to dive into it a little bit more than maybe I would have before. It’s fun to reminisce and take it back to that whole sequence of events and the couple of weeks there, and really that whole year.”
After losing their opening game of the CWS to Oklahoma, the Gamecocks reeled off six consecutive wins, including two against rival Clemson, to win the title. Jackie Bradley, Jr. was the CWS Most Outstanding Player. It marked the final game at historic Rosenblatt Stadium in Omaha which had been the home of the CWS for 61 years.
Omaha is always the goal for Gamecocks, but sometimes the best teams don’t get there. When did the 2010 squad know they had something special?
“It wasn’t early!” Tanner said with a laugh. “We didn’t play very well early. As time went on, we began to find some consistency with our starters and with our bullpen. We had a lot of successful teams while I was here, but there are a lot of good teams. You have to be almost perfect at the end of the year. Those are the teams that advance. You get the big hit. You make the big play. We started doing that in the second half of the season.
“I always talked about putting yourself in the position to get there. I never talked about championships. You just had to stay in position and win the next game.”
“I actually thought we had something early in the fall,” Merrifield said. “I remember doing an interview that fall, and I remember talking about how we didn’t really have a weakness. We had good pitching. We had a good bullpen. We had a really good defense. We had a lineup that could hit for average and hit for power. We could put the ball in play, and we could run. I knew early on that we would have a really good and complete team. It was just a matter of staying healthy and peaking at right time.”
“I thought we were a very good team, and we had a lot of fun together,” said former pitcher Michael Roth. “When you looked at it back then on paper in 2010, we probably weren’t as good as some of the other teams in that bracket, but we ended up having a few big leaguers on the team who had good careers at the next level when you look at Whit Merrifield, Jackie Bradley, Jr., Christian Walker, and Sam Dyson. We had a lot of other exceptional players, even if they didn’t make it to the big leagues. They were just damn good college players. When you look at it now, we probably did have a really good team on paper.”
After sweeping the three games at home in the NCAA Regional and then sweeping Coastal Carolina in a pair of one-run games on the road, South Carolina’s trip to Omaha was almost a short one. After falling to Oklahoma 4-3 in the opener, the Gamecocks bounced back to beat Arizona State 11-4. The Gamecocks were down to their last strike in a rematch with the Sooners in the bottom of the 12th when Jackie Bradley Jr. took a close pitch for a ball inside and then hit a 3-2 pitch through the right side to score Robert Beary and tie the game. Brady Thomas followed with a walk-off RBI single to get the win.
“He took that pitch, and I thought it was game over,” Tanner said. “When I saw it later on tape, it clearly was a ball, but after the game, I asked Jackie how he took that pitch. In his calm demeanor, he just said, ‘it was a ball.’
“It’s great to be in the College World Series, but it’s not a lot of fun to go ‘two and barbecue.’ Let’s stick around and get some more meal money. So, we stuck around. We had opportunities to win every game, and we had opportunities to lose every game. We always made a play. Coach (Steve) Spurrier used to always say, ‘there are players, and then there are play-makers.’ We had lots of those.”
“After we lost that first game, we felt like, let’s just see how long we can stay here,” Merrifield said. “Our running joke was that every time we win a game, we get another day of per diem. So, that was a little part of our motivation.”
They did more than stick around. The Gamecocks defeated rival Clemson twice to get to the National Championship Series where a powerful UCLA team was waiting. A big part of that success was choosing Michael Roth to start the first game against the Tigers. Prior to that, Roth had been a situational reliever who hadn’t started a game in over a year. All he did that day was throw a complete game and allowed one run.
“This was before he was ‘Michael Roth,’” Merrifield said. “He was our left-handed specialist and occasional DH who also played some first base. It felt like a destiny situation at that time.”
“He had a bunch of relief appearances that year, and in most of those appearances he didn’t have to break a sweat,” Tanner said. “Michael told me time and time again that he could do more, but he was a piece to the puzzle coming out of the bullpen and it worked. After we got to that point, I told (pitching coach) Mark Calvi, he’s probably good for three or four (innings), but what do we do after that? We decided that he would calm the game down, and there’s no better time to do that than in the beginning.”
“That year, I did a good job of just not thinking too much,” Roth said. “I was performing at my best when I wasn’t over-thinking things. Most of that year, I knew I had a role to play. It was a small one, but an important one. It shifted in the playoffs. The confidence I was able to take from that College World Series run and that start against Clemson and then the start against UCLA helped roll me into 2011.”
UCLA seemed to have the bigger names on the roster, but the Gamecocks dominated the first game in a 7-1 win thanks to Blake Cooper striking out 10 batters in eight innings and allowing one run on three hits. Game two provided all the drama you could ask for with Whit Merrifield eventually driving in Scott Wingo with a base hit to right in the bottom of the eleventh inning for the 2-1 win to give the Gamecocks the title.
There were unsung heroes as well.
“(Pitcher) Blake Cooper gets lost in all of it sometimes,” Tanner said. “He was phenomenal. (Catcher) Kyle Enders was big. Then there’s Adrian Morales. As much as I wanted to win, he took it to another level.”
Looking back, everyone has their own perspective about what it meant to be a national champion.
“It’s hard to get there,” Tanner said. “I know a lot of really good coaches who never got to the College World Series. I know a lot of really good coaches that got there a lot and never won it. When we lost (in the national championship) in 2002 to Texas, (late Texas coach) Augie Gariddo said to me, ‘you’ll be back, and one day you’ll win it.’ I always believed that, but I knew there was no guarantee. If you get there, your chances increase. That’s the way it worked out.”
“When we won it, it was like, wow, we just climbed this enormous mountain,” Merrifield said. “We were so thrilled, and I don’t think anyone realized the gravity of what we just did until we got back to Columbia.”
The 2010 and 2011 baseball teams are the first to be inducted into the school’s Hall of Fame.
“I think it’s awesome and unique,” Merrifield said. “I’m a little biased, but I think it’s well-deserved! It’s cool that the whole team is being honored that way.”
“I think it’s a great move by the committee and by (Athletics Director) Jeremiah Donatti to move in this direction because there are a lot of teams that deserve this,” Tanner said.